Philip Whear & Trevelyan Kernow - Green Deal Blog

Hi there blog readers Philip Whear here.. I had an interesting conversation with Mr Kernow our lottery winning customer with regards to the new government Green Deal and the call went something like this

P. Whear Good morning how is the purchase of the flats going?

T. Kernow Well, solicitors, don’t we all love them? They make it as complicated as possible, take as long as possible & then charge as much as possible! From your point, I want pretty well want what we last discussed. However I’m calling about this Green Deal thing, I’ve heard bits and pieces and it sounds too good to be true, can you explain what it’s all about?

P. Whear I’ll try, but there’s a lot that is still unclear. The gist of it is, if a property is thermally inefficient, & money is being wasted on lost heat, improvements can be made to reduce heat loss and the savings can pay off a loan which has been made to pay for the work!

T. Kernow Oh, free home improvements then! So it is too good to be true! What sort of things are included then?

P. Whear Well it’s a long list, including: glazing, boilers, heating controls, wall insulation, loft insulation, floor insulation, cylinder & pipe insulation, heat recovery installation, solar & PV panels

T. Kernow Ok, I get the picture, so how on Earth does the money saved cover the finance company’s profit & pay back the capital?

P. Whear An extremely good question, personally I reckon it would on loft insulation if you didn’t have any, but the rest I have many doubts about.

T. Kernow How long & how much are these loans for?

P. Whear £10,000 is the figure generally bandied about, and twenty five years maximum.

T. Kernow A boiler and most windows won’t last that long and how is it paid back?

P. Whear I agree. It is paid back via your electricity bills.

T. Kernow So your new free gas boiler is paid back on your electricity bills, which are inflated to cover the finance, so you use less gas & the same amount of electricity, which cost more per unit to pay off the boiler, offset by the lower gas bills? Well that all makes sense!

P. Whear I think you’ve got the idea, if I’ve understood it correctly myself.

T. Kernow What happens when you sell the property then?

P. Whear The debt remains with the house, so the new owners pay the higher than normal electricity bills for say the next twenty years to pay off the boiler that’s due for replacement again in say half  that time? However it’s possible that I’ve misunderstood some of this.

T. Kernow Who’s going to buy a house with that sort of arrangement then?

P. Whear Well, I understand there are concerns over that.

T. Kernow Well Philip, I think it’s ‘Watch this space’ & see if the government develop this lot into a workable scheme. At the moment it all seems a bit half baked!

P. Whear Well, here’s a quote from Greg Barker UK Minister of State for Energy & Climate Change:

“The Green Deal will be quite simply Britain’s most ambitious home improvement programme ever”

T. Kernow On that note I’ll say thanks for the information, its all clear as mud, I’ll talk to you again soon, bye.

Click here to read what the Guardian Newspaper published this morning 26th Jan 2013 about the Green Deal, once you read make sure you click the comments link as I thought they were very interesting!!!!

Now check out what the Telegraph said on the 25th Jan.

Even the Green websites themselves have this to say Business Green

Humm well all I can say is "watch this space"

The End (for the moment)